Park on Conquest, Slavery and the Property Course

My Georgetown Law colleague K-Sue Park has posted Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Property Law Course:

This chapter addresses the foundational place of the histories of conquest and slavery to American property law and the property law course. It begins by briefly reviewing how these topics have been erased and marginalized from the study of American property law, as mentioned by casebooks in the field published from the late nineteenth century to the present. It then shows how the history of conquest constituted the context in which the singular American land system and traditional theories of acquisition developed, before turning to the history of the American slave trade and the long history of resistance to Black landownership that its abolition fueled. This chapter suggests ways to correct for the tendency of traditional property law curricula to focus exclusively on English doctrines regulating relations between neighbors, rather than the unique fruits of the colonial experiment -- the land system that underpins its real estate market and its structural reliance on racial violence to produce value.

--Dan Ernst